University Smackdown

The bloody Daily Mail today claims that switching the light on while you go for a pee will give you CANCER (for the Mail, the world is divided between things that cause cancer and things which cure cancer - and they're always wrong about both categories).

Leicester University, which clearly has a copy of Ben Goldacre's Bad Science in its library, is rather unimpressed by the distortion of its research and has responded with a barrage of magnificent sarcasm. Hurrah!

There is no connection between illuminated, nocturnal calls of nature and cancer, despite what certain newspapers are claiming.

In fact, neither Professor Kyriacou nor Dr Ben-Shlomo suggest anything of the sort.

What the researchers did was examine the connection between the circadian clock – the biofeedback mechanism which animals and plants use to regulate their physiology on a 24-hour cycle – and cell division, which is also cyclical – in mice. …nowhere in their paper, which is published in the journal Cancer Genetics and Cytogenetics, do they mention trips to the toilet or anything even vaguely similar. That is entirely an invention of the Daily Mail.

For what it’s worth, if you get up in the night to go to the loo, you’re probably best using a dim night-light for purely practical reasons. But that’s all to do with the rods and cones in your eye – nothing to do with cancer and nothing to do with this research. Also, if you don’t use some sort of illumination, you might slip and break your neck - this might be a particular problem with males!)